The "size of the JRE" and other downloads issues are starting to fade away... but that's no reason to stop the work being down to reduce the JRE... as new APIs and extensions will only make the total size of the complete JRE larger.

In any case this is good news for those developing online games or going with cheap, online-only distribution.

Well, those stastics look great for the US. However, the rest of the world isn't doing so well. I think there's an inevitable trend towards high-speed data lines, but I'm afraid dial-up is going to be with us for a long time to come.

Besides, in the same way that you never have enough hard drive space or memory, I expect the size of the JRE will increase accordingly. There's a continual trend for it to get larger - remember the days of the 5MB JDK?

Broadband has pretty spotty coverage here in the uk still. I was fortunate to be able to get cable access last year, but this year its impossible. Bear in mind that i'm someone whos actually activly chasing it, and willing to pay a fair chunk of cash for the speed and convinience. The avarage joe isn't going to put nearly as much effort or be willing to justify the price.

The daft part is that with such limited avalibility, the companies don't think its popular, and so don't put the effort into improving coverage. And where it is avalible, odds are theres only one form avalible, so competition between prices is virutally nil.

Well it's very popular here in Sweden (and rest of northern europe I guess), one (in)famous guy was preaching/chanting broadband 5-10 years ago or so - and now we see results of the trend he started by the fast pace of broadband (his defintion was 10mbit+., but a lot of - evil - companies here even call 512kbit+ broadband...) expanding into more and more houses.

A lot of companies are offering 10+mbit connections in most major cities/villages and then asdl and vsdl are very popular in the smaller villages/coutry side.

Hmmm, while I have never been there, I was under the impression that very few homes in South Korea had broadband. However, in South Korea Internet Cafes are VERY popular. There is one on every corner kind of thing. This is where the Koreans go to play MMO games and the like. Am I wrong?

I am not an expert on South Korea, but I attended several conference sessions at GDC and E3 where South Korea was discussed (usually by South Koreans).

It is true that the PC baans (cafes) are ubiquitous, and that is where the majority of MMO gaming has been to date, primarily for cultural/social reasons. But the households are also wired and MMO gaming is now migrating to the household -- I have heard that Lineage subscriptions are now 50-50 for the PC cafes and households.

Again, this is all hearsay -- I have no direct experience in South Korea!

Oddly enough, I'm actually *cancelling* my broadband connection this month and am actually going to try going without the internet for awhile. At least at home. Basically, the only time I really like having it is Sun releases a new SDK or I'm trying out new Linux iso's. I think I've a workaround for this, though, as I'm getting a 128meg USB keychain this week so maybe I can use my work's nice pipe to get the "big stuff" and take them home with me when necessary and the lack of "time killers" on my machine at home will cause me to actually do "real" work (like working on my game.. or at least the tools I will be using to work on my game (blender (have you SEEN the interface???), bryce, photoshop, eclipse). I gave up TV 3 years ago to find myself refreshing /. every 15 minutes. The internet is a bigger waste of time than TV sometimes..

Yep, and I love it, honest! It's very, very fast once you get used to it. However, if you don't know how to do something, there's pretty much NO way of working it out for yourself. Do yourself a favour and wander down to your friendly book store and purchase The Blender Book (ISBN:1-886411-44-1). It's a few versions old now, and contains a couple of inconsistencies, but it's worth every penny.

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